Noirminor
Bit part performances in film noir
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
Vince Barnett | The Killers | Dir. Robert Siodmark | 1946 | 103 mins
Saturday, September 7, 2024
Walter Baldwin | Cry of The City | 1948 | 95 mins
About a third of the way through Robert Siodmak’s Cry of The City, we find small-time thief Martin Rome (Richard Conte) stuck in a prison hospital awaiting the trial which will undoubtedly send him to the electric chair. He’s been badly wounded in a shoot-out that resulted in him killing a cop, which is why he’s going to fry. As if this wasn’t enough, he’s also increasingly worried for the safety of his sweetly innocent (and shockingly young) girlfriend Teena, who the police want to question in relation to another killing which Martin didn’t do. There is also the matter of a bent lawyer who believes Teena could be tortured into confessing this murder, thereby letting his guilty client off the hook.
Martin desperately needs a way out of the prison hospital but for the time being he is stuck arguing about the cost of getting his bed sheets changed with a bullish guard called Ledbetter. As the two men squabble, a third man is seen mopping the floor between them. During the dispute the man flashes a signal to Martin to let him know he can get his sheets changed for a dollar less than Ledbetter is proposing. Martin haggles and gets the price down, but as Ledbetter leaves he walks into the floor-mopper’s bucket, leading the disgruntled guard to unleash a torrent of abuse at the poor guy. Once Leadbetter is out of earshot this put-upon character offloads his woes to Martin about Leadbetter constantly calling him names. Martin tells him not to worry, that Ledbetter is just a “big boob”, the old boy likes this and with a grin repeats the insult then waddles over to Martin and introduces himself proudly as Orvy (Walter Baldwin), a trustee of the prison.
There is a great subtle physicality to Baldwin’s performance which gives it a realism so often missing from the ‘simple soul’ character that he is portraying, keeping the whole thing from slipping into parody. It’s already a memorable performance and he’s only been on screen a minute. But then comes the clincher! Orvy leans in, his demeanour suddenly changes, and a shrewd confidence takes over his face as he asks: “Wanna break out of here Marty?” It’s a great noir moment, as Orvy’s initial semi-comic relief character suddenly become another scheming noir hustler. He lays out his plan of how Rome can escape and how this will inevitably mean the sacking of Leadbetter. Orvy’s out for revenge and he's thought it all out. For a moment he’s suddenly the brains of the operation, seducing Rome into his scheme. It’s a fine bit of acting, the balancing act of the separate aspects of Orvy’s character is handled deftly, one constantly present in the other.
The theme of duplicitous personality is constantly present throughout Cry of The City, from the sudden switch of Niles the lawyer from jokey charmer at the start of one scene to the leering deliverer of repugnant threats by the end of it; to Martin’s kid brother who is all wannabe street hoodlum until things come to a head and the real sweet sensitive kid we’ve suspected was there all along is revealed. The main emblem of this trait though is Martin who, by the end, is only vainly trying to fool himself that he could be the loving partner to his sweet innocent Teena. There are numerous great performances (with Berry Kroeger, who had one of the best sneers in noir, excelling as the vile Niles) but for all his brief time on screen it’s Baldwin and the character of Orvy that stands out. With the other characters you see it coming, the bent lawyer, the tough kid who ain’t so tough, and the crook who thinks he can change are all staple noir types, but to take a loveable child-like character who “writes like a three-year-old” and give him a cold streak of devious intelligence is not something you see too often. And Baldwin is pitch perfect.
Baldwin had been a prolific small parts actor who, after some time in theatre, began a busy film career in his fifties, racking up near a hundred film parts in the 1940s alone. His roles were mostly amenable kindly grandpa types, often in romantic comedies and he was resoundingly not a noir regular, although he does turn up in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) as an uncharacteristically gruff garage owner. However, with the role of Orvy, Baldwin shows he was an actor capable of memorably nuanced and powerful performances, something it seems he was rarely given the opportunity to explore. There’s a moment just before Richard Conte’s character makes his bid to escape, where he grabs Orvy’s collar and asks him straight if he’s sure his plan will work. When Orvy replies, with sly malevolence, “sure, I’ve been working on it”, the blood runs cold and you wonder what Baldwin could have done with a really nasty role.
Sandy Milroy.
View Movie here: https://archive.org/details/cry-of-the-city-1948_202008
Friday, August 16, 2024
Richard Rust | Underworld U.S.A. | Dir. Sam Fuller | 1961 | 1h 39mins
Friday, July 12, 2024
Peter Lorre | Quicksand | Dir. Irving Pichel | 1950 | 79 mins
1949 was not a good year for Peter Lorre. In 1942 he left a highly successful tenure at Warner Brothers to set up Lorre Inc with Sam Stiefel; by 1949 he was bankrupt and cursing Stiefel’s name to anyone who would listen. His film work was drying up too, partly, Lorre suspected, because he’d been unofficially blacklisted due to his ties to left wing playwright Bertolt Brecht. He was mainly picking up work doing recitals on radio and acting on TV, a medium he loathed. It was a gruelling schedule, made worse by his dependency on morphine. Lorre had battled addiction from his twenties when he was given morphine to relieve a burst appendix. By 1947 he was desperate enough to attempt insulin and shock therapy treatment, damaging both physically and mentally. Neither worked. All was not well in his home life either. His wife Karen Verne, bored, insecure and guilt ridden over a son she had left behind in Europe turned to drink and made several suicide attempts. One might have expected the Peter Lorre who turned up on the set of Irving Pitchel’s Quicksand to have been somewhat depressed, but far from it. According to fellow actor Jeanne Cagney he was very jolly, both with him and the film’s main star, Mickey Rooney, making an inspiring double act off-screen. His performance, however, tells a different story.
The film concerns the antics of one Dan Brady (Mickey Rooney), a cocky auto mechanic whose attempts to impress materialistic femme fatale Vera Novak (Jeanne Cagney) lead him to make a series of disastrous financial decisions which push him into increasingly desperate criminal acts. The film's ‘crime doesn’t pay’ morality is a little hard to swallow at points and the happyish ending is contrived, but its seaside amusements setting is atmospheric, and the performances are all solid. Rooney, usually associated with comedy musicals, delivers an energetic edgy performance worthy of note. But it's Lorre’s performance as Nick, the depressed and bitter penny arcade owner, that steals the film. We first meet Nick when Vera takes Dan to the arcade to flaunt their relationship in front of Nick, with whom she clearly has history. When she provocatively spins round and says, “Hello Nick!” we get a close-up of his response, or lack of it. He sticks a cigarette in his mouth and replies: “Oh it’s you”. His expression is blank, and his voice is full of profound weariness, he is clearly fed up with Vera and, possibly life itself.
Lorre was a masterful screen actor, especially of the close-up, his face capable of casting various minute twitches of expression in rapid succession. Here he barely moves a muscle, yet the despondent feeling that radiates from his blank face and the resigned way he says “Oh it’s you” hits as hard as any of his more animated performances. He brings this same lack of energy and enthusiasm to a fight scene between him and Dan, who seems to be moving at twice the speed of Nick during the tussle. At the end of the fight Lorre is sat in the shadows beaten. He wipes himself clean with a blood-stained handkerchief which he realises incriminates Dan for a mugging he committed earlier. Again, his face remains virtually blank and yet he conveys a sense of sadness, fatigue and scheming calculation all at the same time. It’s almost as if the sadness is permanently etched into his face; as if he couldn’t dispel it even if he wanted to.
Lorre has two other scenes in the film; one where Nick blackmails Dan into stealing a car for him, and another where they exchange the stolen car keys for the incriminating handkerchief. Both scenes see more range from Lorre. The blackmail scene see Nick relaxed and dominant for the first time in the film as he idly toys with Dan, holding up a stolen $50 note to his ear and ‘listening’ to what it tells him as he whispers the name of the man Dan robbed it from. The exchange of the keys is closer to comedy, showing a little of the off-screen warmth the actors clearly shared, but always Lorre brings a jaded sorrow to the proceedings which dominates the scenes. The film shows a wind change in Lorre’s acting which wasn’t picked up on at the time, but you can see the development of this less dynamic, emotionally sincere persona given its fullest expression in his next film, his ill-fated, self-directed German production The Lost One (Der Verlorene, 1951). Over the years critics have come to regard his performance in that film as one of his greatest achievements, praising it for its very personal form of naturalism. Ultimately, Lorre’s was a tragic life and career, a world class actor who, arguably, never fulfilled his potential but none the less used his talents to create some of the most memorable character roles of Hollywood’s Golden age, not to mention his unforgettable performance in Fritz Lang’s German expressionist masterpiece, M (1931). Quicksand is a key moment in his artistic development, where he strove to make a performance uniquely honest and uniquely his own.
Sandy Milroy.
View movie at: https://archive.org/details/quicksand.-1950.-dvdrip.x-264-handjob
Wednesday, June 12, 2024
Mauri Leighton (‘Maurie Lynn’) | The Big Night | Dir. Joseph Losey | 1951 | 71 mins
Monday, May 20, 2024
Florence Bates | The Brasher Doubloon | Dir. John Brahm | 1947 | 72 mins
Friday, May 10, 2024
Glenn Anders | The Lady from Shanghai | Dir. Orson Welles | 1947 | 88 mins
Anders (George Grisby) first appears gazing lewdly through a telescope at the stunning Rita Hayworth (Elsa Bannister) as she gambols on the rocks somewhere in the West Indies. Perspiring heavily in geographically misplaced standard noir uniform––suit, tie, fedora––he steers his small boat to a yacht where Orson Welles (Michael O’ Hara) awaits. He immediately gets under O’Hara’s skin, both for his own palpable leering pleasure and on behalf of his scheming lawyer partner Arthur Bannister, the husband of Elsa Bannister, played with malevolent broken-ness by Everett Sloane. With a maddening grin and a false casual air, he grills O’ Hara on his past and how he once killed someone: ‘I’m very interested in murders … How did you do it? Now let me guess. You did it with your hands didn’t you?’ Cut to a close-up of Anders––all Lewis Carroll’s ‘grin without a face’––‘Tell me, would you do it again? Would you mind killing another man? … Would you kill me if given the chance?’ Then a typically eccentric contortion in his voice: ‘I might giiivve you the chance’.
The spell is broken when Rita Hayworth, immaculate and statuesque, calls to Welles from the rocks: ‘Is there lunch?’ We know Anders will be a malign presence from this point when he twists his head and leers: ‘Is there enough for two?’ Welles gets him off the yacht, but not before Anders intimates that Welles and Hayworth will become embroiled and that it won’t go well. Sure enough, a tremendously ambivalent love scene ensues in the very next scene, only to interrupted by Anders delirious call from boatside: ‘So long kiddieees!’––a phrase that would return later in the film when the voyeur interrupts another intimate moment. This is followed by another one of Anders’ utterly bizarre, elongated vocalisations: ‘BYIEEEEE, BYIEEEEE!’ O' Hara should have heeded the warning. Grisby is onto them. These scenes set the stage for a truly unhinged performance by Anders. In Welles’ deliberately idiosyncratic film, Grisby is at the most extreme edge in a spectrum of excess all around. In a general anatomy of cold and calculated self-interest, Grisby’s strangely irrational actions and expressions provide an overloaded barometer of the social madness that undergirds the clinical economic machinations of the Bannisters.
The plot itself revolves around Grisby’s plan that O’ Hara ‘murder’ him in a scheme to fake his own death. Promising $5000, he explains that since he would not actually be dead and since there would be no corpse, O’ Hara would not be convicted of murder (based on corpus delicti laws). O’ Hara agrees, thinking to use the money to run away with Elsa, and so furthering another classic noir doomed lovers’ plot. Apart from O’ Hara––a typically self-flattering creation by Welles: Irish rebel, radical dockworker, and Spanish civil war anti-Fascist––the characters are driven inexorably towards human ugliness by monetary concerns. An impromptu soliloquy by O’ Hara captures the tenor of this theme when he likens the behaviour of the Bannisters and Grisby to a pack of frenzied sharks he had once seen cannibalise each other in a zero-sum bloodbath of avarice. Two scenes are rightfully famous for their startling visual inventiveness and must be mentioned in digressive passing: an aquarium scene signifying both the murky, subterranean relationship between O’Hara and Elsa Bannister and O’ Hara’s descent into the world of ‘sharks’; and a brilliantly shot and choreographed shootout in the hall of mirrors of an empty fun house.
Despite Welles being Welles, Hayworth’s blond-headed statuesque presence and Everett Sloane’s quintessentially noirish portrait of a decadent, alienated man of wealth, Anders’ many eccentric utterances and gestures steal the show. In one cleverly constructed scene on the yacht Bannister lectures O’Hara on money while bikini-clad Elsa lounges nonchalantly on the deck. Grisby, in the foreground, provides a tittering meta-commentary on the discussion and at one point, in unflattering close-up, turns his head to the conversation with a deeply enigmatic and knowing grimace. Why? What does this strange ambivalent gesture mean? The magic of Anders’ performance is in how he raises such questions in the most idiosyncratic manner. When he makes his proposition to O’ Hara, all intense staring eyes and sweating brow––framed from above a vertiginous cliff––Anders growls, ‘I want you to kiiiill me’, before leaving Welles hanging precipitously with an unexpectedly cheerful: ‘So long fella’! In another scene he asks Welles to sign the confession of murder, ‘nothing very binding or important really, just a confession of murder’, before toasting the proposal with a ‘here’s to crime!’ and a bizarre little gulp-cum-sneer that no description can adequately capture. In another, after shooting Bannister’s aide––who is trying to bribe him––he barely misses a beat before pinning Welles to his car seat with a narrative of the murder O’Hara is yet to commit, replete with manic snorting and cackling: ‘Yeah, I was just doing a little taaarget practice, that’s what you’re going to say isn’t it when you shoot the gun down by the boat landing?...You’re going to say, I was just doing a little target practice’. ‘Course really you’re suppooosed to have shot me and later when no-one is looking, you’re suppooosed to have thrown my coooarpse into the bay’. Welles knew what he was doing with Anders, whose unexpectedly gleeful and queer utterances are framed in extreme close up to enhance their eccentricity.
Ultimately Anders’ character is killed by Elsa Bannister offscreen with little fanfare, going the same way as so many noir characters before him. This is perhaps a fitting allegory for the celebrated stage actor who made only a handful of films. With Lady of Shanghai especially, and also to a lesser extent in a small but notable part in Joseph Losey’s excellent 1951 version of Fritz Lang’s M (1931), he elevated the minor character to something far greater than the sum of its small part, memorably imposing his beguiling strangeness on proceedings. Noir fans can only mourn what cinema lost to the stage and be thankful for what we got. What we got in The Lady from Shanghai was an unrivalled performance of unpredictable and outlandish brilliance.
Neil Gray.
View Movie: https://archive.org/details/the-lady-from-shanghai-1947
Vince Barnett | The Killers | Dir. Robert Siodmark | 1946 | 103 mins
What’s not to like? Directed by Robert Siodmark, an accomplished noir director, adapted from an Ernest Hemingway short story, and starring B...
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The Big Night is a relatively minor noir by Joseph Losey, shaded in that same year by his excellent remake of Fritz Lang’s M , and The Prowl...
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1949 was not a good year for Peter Lorre. In 1942 he left a highly successful tenure at Warner Brothers to set up Lorre Inc with Sam Stiefel...
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In 1947, Jules Dassin began a brilliant streak of noirs: Brute Force , The Naked City , Thieves Highway , Night and the City . Our focus her...